Wireline and wireless Internet protocol (IP) networks have traditionally supported a best effort delivery of all traffic. To support enhanced services, multiple types, or classes, of services have been established and assigned certain class of service (CoS) parameters that help engineer queues for each service type.
The CoS parameters include delay, jitter, error rates, and throughput. The CoS parameters can be provisioned on a per IP connection or per flow basis through mechanisms such as resource reservation protocol (RSVP) or can be provisioned on aggregate flows which are classified into service classes. Internet service providers (ISPs) can utilize the service classes, their associated CoS behavior and CoS provisioning to provide tiered service offerings to their business and consumer customers.
Typically, each service class is allocated a bandwidth to transport corresponding traffic in accordance with the CoS policy. The allocation of bandwidth prevents starvation traffic flows at each CoS level. Traffic in excess of the allocated bandwidths for a service class is held, or dropped causing delay and/or retransmissions.